What became most painfully clear during this exercise is that for those of us who grew up in these United States, White racism inflicts childhood traumas on all of us, and it doesn’t stop—the trauma keeps right on coming.
Your own first experience of White racism will most likely be very different from the four examples I’ve given here. If you’re a Black person, your first experience of White racism may have come, if not directly from White people, from other Black people in the form of colorism or internalized White racism. If you’re a White person, what your experience won’t be is your first memory of when a Black person poked fun or got angry at you. If we’re White, we’re going for the first experience of one-way overt oppression aimed by White people at people of color. What happened? How did you feel? What did you do?
Next up, we’ll meet some very cool beings who can help us journey back in time to bring some healing to that experience.
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